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Posted on Techdirt - 9 April 2011 @ 12:00pm

Crade's Favorite Techdirt Posts Of The Week

from the favorite-them-up dept

This week's favorites post comes from crade

Happy Saturday to the workers. I guess we have another week of dirty tech and it would be good to review, summarize, and have a look at the best posts of the week. We aren't going to, though; we are going to have a look at the ones I happened to take a fancy to instead.

Now I am a great lover of irony and one of the things I have found the most ironic about this whole ever-encroaching copyright "cage of security" is that while the biggest pushers for a smaller cage claim it's all for the protection of the artists, they are near legendary for their constant mistreatment of those artists. Not only that but copyright is one of the strongest tools they have used to do it. So it was in the heyday of vinyl and so it is today. So, here they are again, using copyright legislation to force the takedown of the work of an emerging artist. And using their stricter rules to censor people trying to speak against them and to keep people from trying to be artists all while Senator Leahy claims there is no First Amendment issue at all.

Ironic enough? Ha! It gets better. At the same time that the record labels use stricter laws to censor new music, they are also breaking the law themselves. The artists are lining up to sue the labels for infringment and the record labels could owe them up to $2 billion. Of course making sure artists get paid for their hard work is the labels' greatest desire, their raison-d'être and certainly the reason they need to make the security cage so tight we can't breathe.

I know I shouldn't find this stuff funny, but I can't help it.

Besides being a lover of irony, I am a somewhat lawfully minded individual. I believe in the law (to a decent extent). Laws are decided jointly, to a minimum extent (if they were not, there would be rebellion), and when the law is wrong, or bad, I believe it needs to be addressed, not reinterpreted to do "less" harm, nor ignored nor casually broken. Now laws that are wrong are not easy to fix, certainly my opinion is not going to do it, and I'm not entirely convinced even logical arguments from the Harvard Business Review, explaining how big content is strangling innovation, are going to get the job done. In order to get laws changed, we need outrage.

The completely unjustified secrecy around ACTA generated some nice controversy and got a few people asking questions, and now with the TPP, they may be doing the same thing. Splendid! Alzheimer's Institute of America directly interfering with Alzheimer's research by suing a bunch of other researchers has the potential to ruffle a few feathers. Although the ridiculous liability issues Google and Yahoo are facing (Google is being found liable for its Autocomplete Suggestions and Yahoo for its users being able to search for infringing movies) are over in Italy this week, perhaps it is a sign of things to come. Or maybe it will piss them off enough to start doing more about the issue in general.

We have seen that people are willing to get up in arms about the hyperbolic amount of cashola involved in copyright infringement lawsuits, so maybe it's a good thing that the record companies aren't letting up on that front, as well, and are still appealing to try to get Joel Tenenbaum to pay $675,000 for downloading a measly 30 songs. Sliding in at the last minute, Denmark's recent decision to endorse retroactive copyright extensions sure seems outrageous to me, so here's hoping it makes some waves.

So thats what I come to Techdirt for. A little humor, and hopefully some pot stirring and a bit of hope for the future!

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